Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a data transmission scheme where data is split into a plurality of smaller streams and each stream is transmitted using a sub-carrier with a smaller bandwidth than the total available transmission bandwidth. The efficiency of OFDM depends on choosing these sub-carriers orthogonal to each other. The sub-carriers do not interfere with each other while each carrying a portion of the total user data.
An OFDM system has advantages over other wireless communication systems. When the user data is split into streams carried by different sub-carriers, the effective data rate on each sub-carrier is much smaller. Therefore, the symbol duration is much larger. A large symbol duration can tolerate larger delay spreads. Thus, it is not affected by multipath as severely. Therefore, OFDM symbols can tolerate delay spreads without complicated receiver designs. However, typical wireless systems need complex channel equalization schemes to combat multipath fading.
Another advantage of OFDM is that the generation of orthogonal sub-carriers at the transmitter and receiver can be done by using inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) and fast Fourier transform (FFT) engines. Since the IFFT and FFT implementations are well known, OFDM can be implemented easily and does not require complicated receivers.
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) refers to a type of wireless transmission and reception scheme where both a transmitter and a receiver employ more than one antenna. A MIMO system takes advantage of the spatial diversity or spatial multiplexing and improves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and increases throughput.
Generally there are two modes of operation for MIMO systems: an open loop mode and a closed loop mode. The closed loop mode is used when channel state information (CSI) is available to the transmitter and the open loop is used when CSI is not available at the transmitter. In the closed loop mode, CSI is used to create virtually independent channels by decomposing and diagonalizing the channel matrix by preceding at the transmitter and further antenna processing at the receiver. The CSI can be obtained at the transmitter either by feedback from the receiver or through exploiting channel reciprocity.
A minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver for open loop MIMO needs to compute weight vectors for data decoding and the convergence rate of the weight vectors is important. A direct matrix inversion (DMI) technique of correlation matrix converges more rapidly than a least mean square (LMS) or maximum SNR processes. However, the complexity of the DMI process increases exponentially as the matrix size increases. An eigen-beamforming receiver for the closed loop MIMO needs to perform SVD on the channel matrix. The complexity of the SVD processes also increases exponentially as the channel matrix size increases.